Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Ltd has de­clared af­ter-tax prof­it of $257.3 mil­lion for the fi­nan­cial year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2022, a 58.8 per cent in­crease over the $162 mil­lion the com­pa­ny re­port­ed in its 2021 fi­nan­cial year.

The whol­ly state-owned com­pa­ny re­port­ed an 80.6 per cent in­crease in its rev­enue from con­tracts with cus­tomers, which jumped to $14.1 bil­lion in its 2022 fi­nan­cial year from $7.8 bil­lion in 2021.

Paria said that of the to­tal of 15.2 mil­lion bar­rels of prod­uct sold, some 7.3 mil­lion bar­rels were sup­plied to the lo­cal mar­ket for the pe­ri­od end­ing Sep­tem­ber 30, 2022. That com­pares to 14.5 mil­lion bar­rels of prod­uct sold in the 12-month pe­ri­od end­ing Sep­tem­ber 30, 2021, of which 6.5 mil­lion bar­rels was sold on the lo­cal mar­ket.

In his re­port ac­com­pa­ny­ing Paria’s au­dit, the com­pa­ny’s chair­man, New­man George, said its per­for­mance was “dri­ven by in­creas­ing prices on the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket.”

The chair­man’s said, “Ef­fec­tive cost man­age­ment mea­sures, op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cies and favourable mar­ket con­di­tions en­abled the com­pa­ny to gen­er­ate a prof­it for the year of $257 mil­lion.”

The com­pa­ny al­so re­port­ed that its cash bal­ances at the end of Sep­tem­ber 30, 2022 amount­ed to $836.9 mil­lion. Cash flows gen­er­at­ed from op­er­at­ing ac­tiv­i­ties for its 2022 fi­nan­cial year to­talled $292.9 mil­lion.

The notes of the fi­nan­cials in­di­cate that Paria is a guar­an­tor of a new Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um US$500 mil­lion bond and a new US$475 mil­lion Her­itage term loan.

Paria was es­tab­lished in Oc­to­ber 2018, fol­low­ing the Gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to close the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery.